A modern horror classic gets an epic upgrade
The 30-year-old indie filmmaker is now hot property in Hollywood — and could be Marvel’s next great hope
Train To Busan was a highspeed zombie blast. The scale-expanding sequel PENINSULA aims to dial up the fear and the thrills
FEW HORROR MOVIES have captured the terror of rail travel better than Train To Busan. Korean director Yeon Sangho’s high-concept zombies-on-a-train movie trapped a bunch of unsuspecting passengers in confined quarters with a rapidly-spreading infection, as society collapsed out of the window. (Edgar Wright, a director not unfamiliar with the undead, declared it the “best zombie movie I’ve seen in forever. A total crowd-pleaser”.) But what does
that world look like four years down the tracks, after Train reached its terminus?
Prepare for Peninsula, Yeon’s follow-up that swaps cramped carriages for a wide-open, post-apocalyptic cityscape, where the running dead are still at large, militant factions rule the streets, and one band of returning survivors — led by Gang Dongwon’s Jungseok — is chasing a big abandoned bounty. Just as the claustrophobic Alien gave way to the explosive Aliens, Peninsula
is a horror sequel that doubles down on the thrills and spills. “From the beginning I thought that it was going to take a very different approach,” the director tells Empire. “It’s actually more of an action film compared to Train To Busan,
which was more idea-led and high-concept.”
Which isn’t to say that Peninsula doesn’t have ideas. With swirling influences including Mad Max 2 (“One of the first apocalypse movies I ever saw,” says Yeon), John Carpenter films, and even Waterworld, there’s social commentary (North
Korea has ironically become a safe zone), car chases and zombie arena battles — where one sequence, involving a writhing mass of contorted corpses, is delivered in a single take. “We wanted the audience to feel the exact emotion and fear the people in that scene were feeling,” explains Yeon. “We came up with a video sequence with the action team, and we did the whole scene according to that video — the characters that played the zombies went through extensive rehearsals to do the whole thing in a single take.”
Away from the arena, the port city of Incheon (chosen by Yeon to showcase “ordinary people and places” away from the capital Seoul) remains overrun with cardio-adept undead hordes. As established in Train To Busan, they’re blind in the dark, and at night flock to loud noises and flashing lights — cue the unlikely sight of zombies tearing down abandoned streets chasing neon-disco toys and full-sized promotional vehicles designed to distract them from human prey. “We took time brainstorming what kind of daily tactics these people would have used for the past four years to survive,” says Yeon. “Cars that have these very fancy, colourful nightclub adverts are something that Koreans are quite familiar with, so that’s what we decided to use.”
Beyond the zombie fights and disco lights of Peninsula, Yeon sees a bright future in his apocalypse — though after directing three films in the series (including animated prequel Seoul Station), he’s looking to pastures new. “Peninsula is the story of one person, so there’s definitely more room for different stories to tell,” he says. “I have other projects lined up that I’m planning to direct. I don’t think that I would be going into another zombie film for the time being.” Who knows — maybe in four years’ time, the wasteland just might draw him back.
NIA DACOSTA WAS 16 years old when she first saw Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam War epic
Apocalypse Now. As the film started, she wanted to be a writer. But by the time it ended, her life — and path — had changed. “It was just so crazy, and had so much to say. It was super-audacious,” she remembers. “When I watched it, I thought, ‘Oh, you can do anything.’” Which could be the understatement of the century. Now, at just 30 years old, Dacosta is one of the most exciting and in-demand filmmaking voices in the business. With Candyman coming later this year, and the keys to a billion-dollar superhero franchise reportedly next up, it is a fairly stratospheric rise.
That journey began in her native New York, studying film at Tisch School Of The Arts, fuelled by a love of Spielberg, Lumet and Scorsese. Her directing career started in earnest with the Tessa Thompson-starring 2018 debut, Little Woods, which brought her to the attention of Jordan Peele, who was looking for someone to direct his
Candyman remake; someone who could deliver the visuals and viscera required of a horror film on the surface, but also the deeper subtext about the Black experience.
“One of the interesting things about the original Candyman is the fact that he killed a bunch of Black people,” she says. “I always found that really interesting. I wanted to tell a story about a ghost that felt true to the fact that he was a victim of violence, and a perpetrator of violence. This is not a hero’s journey. This is a portrait of a person and what the world has turned into.”
Like a host of her contemporaries, such as Rian Johnson or Gina Prince-bythewood, Dacosta is a director forged in both an arthouse and blockbuster bubble. “It’s something I want to bring to bigger movies — more dimensions, something more idiosyncratic.” Which may come in handy for her next gig. Just before Empire speaks to Dacosta, news breaks that she has been hired to direct Captain Marvel 2. It’s huge news (and as sure a sign as any that the pandemic-postponed Candyman is going to rock). There’s just one problem: it hasn’t been officially confirmed, so Dacosta can’t discuss it.
Officially. “What is that?” she laughs. “I’ve never heard of her.” But, in tiptoeing around the subject, it’s clear why she’s the right choice for the continuing adventures of Carol Danvers.
“I’m a huge nerd,” she laughs. “The other day I was alphabetising my [comic-book] collection. I grew up with comics and cartoons, and it’s a big part of my storytelling growth as well.” So, hypothetically speaking of course, would she be excited about making that step up in scale? “I would be excited about progression,” she says, choosing her words more carefully than anyone in history. “The next Nia Dacosta film I’m going to make is definitely genre, and super-specific, and super-me, which I’m excited about.” From Apocalypse Now to — potentially — directing a billion-dollar blockbuster, in less than 15 years? Smells like… victory.
WHEN YOU’VE DESTROYED half the population of the universe with just a click of your fingers (or, in this case, a tap of a computer key), where do you go next? For Christopher Markus and Stephen Mcfeely, the writers of Avengers double-bill Infinity War and Endgame, the answer was obvious: they had to go smaller in scale, because going bigger was impossible; but not smaller in import. Their next movie as writers, pandemic permitting, will tackle the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the fallout of which had real-world implications of which Thanos could only dream.
“We ended up talking to Chris Wylie, the whistleblower, well before he blew the whistle,” explains Mcfeely who, along with Markus, is now Co-president Of Story at AGBO, the studio that Joe and Anthony Russo established for their post-marvel gigs. “The story came AGBO’S way, and as he was telling the story we went, ‘How can people not know this? This is crazy, and super-important.’”
The short version: Cambridge Analytica was a British data company that illegally harvested data from millions of Facebook users, some of which was later used in the political campaigns of Ted Cruz and Donald Trump. The full scale of the data breach only became apparent when Wylie, who founded the company, blew the whistle in 2018.
It’s a sprawling subject for a movie, even if it focuses on Wylie, but Markus and Mcfeely feel that it’s a story that needs to be told. “It has a lot to do with the world we live in now,” says Markus. “That said, we wouldn’t have told it if it didn’t have a really good character story in it.” “It’s funny, and dark,” adds Mcfeely. “It’s incumbent on us to make it fun,” chimes Markus. “Otherwise, it’s a documentary.”
At one point, David Gordon Green had been attached to direct, but now that task falls to Matt Shakman, while a number of big-name actors are circling the project, with Paul Bettany one of them (he won’t be playing Wylie). And should it come out, as planned, in 2021, the duo hope that it will open a lot of eyes about the current political landscape, and the state of the world. “If you really take it in,” says Mcfeely, “it’ll make you change the way you use your computer and social media forever.” #Intriguing.